Tuesday

Sep 10, 2019 at 5:30 AMSep 10, 2019 at 9:32 PM

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — Several minutes after the final horn sounded, a stone-faced man weaved through a crowd of happy Boston Bruins at Nationwide Arena.

Jarmo Kekalainen found his counterpart, Bruins general manager Don Sweeney, and gave him a firm, congratulatory handshake after Boston’s second-round triumph against the Blue Jackets. It was a stinging defeat, for the Blue Jackets and their GM, and Kekalainen has thought about it ever since.

The Blue Jackets open training camp Thursday. Artemi Panarin, Sergei Bobrovsky and Matt Duchene are gone, but Gustav Nyquist, Alexandre Texier, Emil Bemstrom and Elvis Merzlikins are about to arrive, not to mention a host of others eager to keep the Jackets afloat despite their heavy free-agent losses.

“You need to recharge the battery (in the summer), but every time you’re disappointed, you want to get another crack at it,” Kekalainen said Tuesday, before the Jackets won the third-place game of the annual NHL Prospect Tournament 5-4 in overtime against the Toronto Maple Leafs. “We’re at the start of another season, and we have another opportunity to compete for the Stanley Cup.”

Before it begins, Kekalainen talked with The Dispatch about the season ahead. Here is an edited version of that conversation:

• You have said for a while that you’re confident the Blue Jackets will remain competitive. What drives that confidence?

“Why wouldn’t we be confident? Just because a couple players left? This is a team game. We were successful before Panarin ever got to us, and goaltending … there are great examples all around the league where guys who never really got the opportunity all of a sudden got it and proved to everybody they’re worthy of it and can carry the load of being a No. 1 goalie. So, that’s where the confidence comes from.

"We still have one of the best groups of defensemen in the league and a lot of talented forwards who are young and only going to get better. There are a lot of reasons to be confident.”

• Will you watch camp even closer than usual this year, just because there are multiple rookies vying for NHL spots?

“It’ll be more closely watched when we get to the start of camp with the big boys, and we start scrimmaging there and we start playing exhibition games against NHL players. This tournament’s great for evaluation, and certainly we’re going to look at it carefully every year. The guys that rise above the level of play here and are among the best here usually have a great chance of playing for us the year after, and there are plenty of examples of that in the past.

"You can see they’re elite here and they have a smaller transition step to the NHL. That’s what I see with a guy like Texier. He’s among the best here, and I think he’s going to have a really good chance of not only making our team, but making an impact on our team.”

• Are you expecting Merzlikins to have some bumps in the road as he adjusts to smaller rinks in North America?

“It’s just two games in now. (Elvis) has another month to prepare for the NHL season. I think every day is a great learning lesson for him. (Goaltending coach) Manny (Legace) is working with him, and he’ll be ready."

• You had enough cap space to sign a veteran NHL free agent to mitigate the loss of Bobrovsky in net. How come you’re going with all young guys?

“Because I don’t want our guys going somewhere else to get an opportunity and becoming No. 1 goalies for the rivals. It’s happened so many times if you look around the league, where the goalies who are now No. 1s were No. 2s somewhere else and they got traded without getting the proper opportunity. Now, they’re No. 1s. So, I want to give our guys an opportunity to become No. 1s. If they can do it, great. If they can’t, we’ll react to the situation.”

• You made some strong statements about wanting guys who want to be Blue Jackets. Did you take this offseason personally, in terms of what happened in free agency?

“No, it’s not personal at all. What I believe the team should be constructed of is guys that want to bleed for that team and play hard, and give it everything they’ve got. They embrace the logo, they embrace the organization and the city. That’s the type of guys we want on our team, not guys that don’t want to be there or leave for other reasons other than winning and being on a good team and building something together.

"If they want to leave for other reasons, they can leave. I can’t do anything about it. We did everything we could. We wanted them to stay for the right reasons, with a fair salary, and keep building what we were building, and they chose to do otherwise. And that’s their right. We have to respect that, but I agree with (coach John Tortorella): Don’t talk about winning. Don’t say, ‘We left because we want to win' with some other team, when there are four teams in the National Hockey League that have won more games than we have in the regular season the last three years. So, you know, that’s BS, in my opinion. Just be honest about the reasons why you wanted to make a change and there’s no problem.”

• Has the perception of the Columbus Blue Jackets changed the past seven years?

“Well, like I said, there are four teams in the last three years that have won more games in the regular season. So, we talk about earning respect around the league and I think we have, but we have to keep doing that. It’s every day that you have to earn it. You can also lose it very quickly if you think you’ve arrived and everything is going smooth ... you have to get there by earning your respect and you have to stay there by earning the respect. So, we’re going to keep doing the same things over and over again, and hopefully we’ll stay there and earn the respect of the whole league.”

bhedger@dispatch.com

@BrianHedger

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